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In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don't cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.

Italo Calvino

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Italo Calvino
Age: 62 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 15
Died: 1985
Died: September 19
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Santiago de Compostela de las Vegas
Italo Giovanni Calvino Mameli
Italo Giovanni Calvino
Little
Principles
Many
Bits
Illusions
Important
Stop
Sphere
Every
Politics
Spheres
Believe
Sense
Cherish
Never
Helping
Believing
Men
Two
Helps
Life
Littles
Illusion

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.
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I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.
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The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
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Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
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How well I would write if I were not here!
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Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
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At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
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…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
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Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
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The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.
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A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
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The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
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Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.
Italo Calvino
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The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
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Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.
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My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.
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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
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Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
Italo Calvino